


The Oldest Form of Flattery

by aazeal



Category: Good Omens - Neil Gaiman & Terry Pratchett
Genre: Canon Compliant, Fade to Black, First Time, Ineffable Husbands (Good Omens), It may start off running but we, Kissing, M/M, but we still get some good old fashion
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-23
Updated: 2020-06-23
Packaged: 2021-03-04 07:40:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,846
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24870022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aazeal/pseuds/aazeal
Summary: Tonight, they were discovering a third act. One that involved their bodies slotted together; hands exploring and the sliding of lips.Just as Aziraphale’s fingers snapped, Crowley experienced a single, horrifying  moment of clarity.Aziraphale had never seen the bedroom.
Relationships: Aziraphale & Crowley (Good Omens), Aziraphale/Crowley (Good Omens)
Comments: 9
Kudos: 91





	The Oldest Form of Flattery

**Author's Note:**

> I know ya'll love to imagine Crowley's bedroom as dark and sexy but I raise you this: maybe he's a giant pining nerd.
> 
> Many thanks to Katneto for the beta. You are the best.

As a general rule, their evenings always consisted of two acts. First dinner and then the  _ nightcap _ . 

With Aziraphale, dinner was a marathon event. Not a gluttonous affair, but a leisurely one. A pace which generally kept them until dangerously close to the establishments’ closing time. 

The nightcap was more like a 50-yard sprint to the goal, which was to get very, very, drunk. 

Tonight, they were discovering a third act. One that involved their bodies slotted together; hands exploring and the sliding of lips. 

Crowley was not complaining.

He slid his hands down Aziraphale's sides, settling on hips he’d spent centuries fantasizing about. The angel let out a breathy gasp as Crowley tugged, pulling them flush. 

He teased at Aziraphale's eagerly parting lips. 

The angel pushed and pulled them towards the bedroom. Crowley let him lead. Let him set the pace. After 6,000 years of idling, it was thrilling to see him finally catapulting them forward to  _ this _ . 

With nips, moans, and breaths, they slowly made their way down the hallway until Aziraphale had him pressed against the bedroom door, his mouth doing a number up and down Crowley’s neck. 

Breaking through the haze, it dawned on him then that Aziraphale had never seen Crowley’s bedroom before. 

_ But he knew which door it was.  _ The thought made Crowley shiver. 

There was the briefest of hesitations, A ziraphale lifted his head to look him in the eye, silently asking for permission. One hand was in Crowley’s hair, and the other resting on the door handle. Cr owley brushed his thumb over Aziraphale’s swollen bottom lip, “Having second thoughts, Angel?”

His eyes flickered down to Crowley’s kiss bruised lips and back up before saying, “Not at all.” 

Then the angel pushed them both through the door and into the darkness beyond. 

He could feel Aziraphale start to pull away to look for the lightswitch behind them. Crowley grunted in frustration at the loss of contact, and doubled his efforts to pull the angel further into the room.  _ Forget the sodding lights.  _ The angel’s hand did not immediately return to its proper place on Crowley’s hip. Apparently visibility was important to Aziraphale. He wanted to  _ see  _ Crowley. That thought both thrilled and terrified him and he felt the words against his lips as the angel mumbled, “Let there be light”. 

Just as Aziraphale’s fingers snapped, Crowley experienced a single, horrifying moment of clarity. 

_ Aziraphale had  _ **never** _ seen the bedroom. _

++++++

The first thing Aziraphale noticed was how suddenly frozen Crowley had become. He’d pulled back to ask what the matter was when his eyes finally adjusted and he became fully aware of their surroundings. 

Aziraphale blinked in the light, "This-” H e pulled back further and Crowley gave an anguished groan and attempted to hide his face in the angel’s neck. "Crowley- this is my bedroom."

"No sss'not,” His voice was muffled by Aziraphale’s coat.

"Yes, yes it is!" 

Crowley hissed as with some effort Aziraphale disentangled their limbs in order to take a few steps further into the bedroom. 

“Not exssactly.”

Complete with his large four poster bed, faded green and cream toile wallpaper and old walnut floorboards, It was unmistakably  _ his  _ bedroom. He took a few turns to confirm that yes, it was the exact same size and shape of the bedroom he knew to still be back above his bookshop. Aziraphale sat down gingerly on the edge of the bed, giving a couple experimental bounces. It was like looking at one of those picture puzzles in the back of a magazine, ‘spot the differences!’ Aziraphale found it slightly dizzying. 

The sheets under him, for one, were not his tartan but a silvery blue. There were a few potted plants scattered throughout and Aziraphale had to admit that the room felt remarkably larger without his usual towering stacks of books. 

There was not a complete absence of books though. Aziraphale spotted a neat collection stacked carefully on the desk. Some were even familiar to him. 

Or all of them. 

Aziraphale nearly jumped back onto his feet in order to bolt over to the desk and snatch up his very own first edition copy of  _ The Scarlet Pimpernel _ , which he had not seen since 1910. His mind could not fully grasp this doppelganger room so it latched onto the one thing Aziraphale could always have sure footing on: his books. 

“You told me, a  _ century  _ ago, that this had been stolen by that hooligan, the baker’s son!” From the looks of it, the entire collection had been pilfered from Aziraphale’s store.

They accounted for every single book that had mysteriously gone missing here and there from Azirphale’s collection over the course of the last 200 years. “Crowley?”

Any irritation he had briefly felt drained at the sight of Crowley, still frozen near the door, head bent in a staring match with the floor. He was beet red all the way to the tips of ears. His fingers twitched as if searching to adjust glasses that were not there. Aziraphale had made sure to discard those much earlier in the night, thank you very much. 

"Crowley, why do you have a copy of my bedroom in your apartment?" The demon still refused to meet his eyes but he did at least slowly drift over to Aziraphale’s side. Aziraphale carefully placed the book back down and led them both back to sit on the bed. 

Aziraphale waited patiently.

Crowley took a deep breath and mumbled something up at the ceiling. 

“I’m sorry, what was that?”

For a moment it looked like he still might continue to deny the room’s very existence but then Aziraphale took his hand in his own, cool fingers dusting over the light hairs of his knuckles. That seemed to reassure him. 

"The plants missed you?” he hedged. 

Aziraphale raised an unseen eyebrow and said nothing. Crowley could not miss his obvious skepticism.

Crowley shifted his hand to grip Aziraphales a little more firmly. "Alright…” 

Crowley let out a deep bone weary sigh, his frame sagging with its release. “Because... because sometimes I needed it to feel like home. Because somewhere along the line, you became mine.”

+++++++++++++++++

Staying the night at Aziraphale’s had always done funny things to Crowley’s insides. When Crowley finally did put a name to it, he was already too far gone.

The first few times were an honest drunken mistake. But Crowley couldn’t deny the warmth that spread through him as he woke for the first time. The feeling of rightness; the desire to repeat. 

It wasn’t unusual for Aziraphale to offer Crowley a place to crash when he got too drunk to miracle himself sober. But the angel would probably start getting suspicious if Crowley just refused to ever leave. 

It hadn't even been a conscious decision at first. 

He'd been casually flipping through the wallpapering options when he'd first moved into his Mayfair flat. Mostly to kill time before meeting Aziraphale for lunch. The bedroom was technically already designed- miracled at the same time as the rest of the flat-  _ sleek and minimalistic _ . But a catalogue had been among his junk mail and so there he was going through it on a lark when he came across a swatch that was a dead ringer for Aziraphale's ridiculous wallpaper.

He had laughed at first- almost rang Aziraphale up to tell him about it. To tell him that they were still selling this dreadful pattern and maybe he needed to apologize for all the times he called Aziraphale outdated. Wouldn't it just be a laugh if they had matching bedroom walls. 

With his fingers inches away from his phone, he’d stopped. That had been it, hadn’t it? Matching bedroom walls. Sort of like sharing bedroom walls. He imagined what it would be like to wake up to that everyday. His heart had lurched. 

So again, totally on a lark- for shits and giggles, just to see, you see, he snapped and instantly, the wallpaper sprung up the walls.

It looked absolutely atrocious. 

It reminded him of Aziraphale.

He loved it. 

Of course it didn't match any of his furniture. There was only one type of furniture that could possibly fit in with this kind of design: Aziraphale's type of furniture. Meaning clunky, large imposing pieces made of aged wood and detailed with delicate tiny french accents. With a shrug, Crowley snapped those into existence as well. 

He still refused to allow tartan into his apartment unless Aziaraphale physically carried it in on his own person. Instead, the four poster bed sported sleek dark blue covers. Egyptian cotton. He  _ also _ had standards. 

That first night he had gone to sleep excited but also feeling nervous like he was getting away with something he shouldn’t have.

There was a moment when he woke up, when his mind was still in that space somewhere between blissful sleep and real consciousness where everything felt right. Until he noticed all the ways in which it was wrong.

Because the first thing he saw was the ceiling. Aziraphale's ceiling was not flat concrete. Azirapale's ceiling was vaulted, painted a soft uneven cream. There should be a patch just to the right of the door where you can see an older darker color peaking through. Crowley had always suspected that Aziraphale may have painted the ceiling himself the  _ human  _ way, but he had never asked. 

Snap of the fingers, and ready for round two. 

The next morning also started out with promise. He woke early and let out a pleased little groan as he stretched out his legs and felt the sheets slide across his body. He leaned his head back on his hands, to watch the light from the window creep across the newly modified ceiling. After a few minutes of idle meditation, it dawned on him that the light was all wrong. Azirapale's window was an eastern facing. Not north like Crowley's and definitely not a beautifully large modern single pane. No- Zira had bubble glass with paint cracked shutters. 

Crowley frowned. The window itself wouldn't be too hard to fix. But the geography was a little off. His east facing wall was technically the hallway.  Crowley hesitated for just a minute before deciding,  _ yeah, we're doing this _ .

A little bending of space and time wasn't going overboard.

A small nudge in reality and just like that, he now had a window where there shouldn’t have been able to be a window, overlooking a street that shouldn’t have been able to be there. 

Content, he had laid back down to enjoy the rest of the sunrise. 

That honestly lasted a few good weeks. That is until one night, after a very enjoyable evening of drinking and a heated discussion on the merits of the rubber duck, Aziraphale had patted Crowley on the knee and told him that unless he sobered up, he best not be going back to his flat tonight and he was, as always, more than welcome to stay the night. Crowley had mumbled about being too sloshed to bother and had toppled head first into Aziraphale's bed, maybe letting out a little happy sigh-- but that was no-one's business--and slept until well into midday.

How could he have ever thought that his sham of a bedroom could have ever compared to this? Miracling the hangover away, Crowley let himself breathe in the overwhelming scent of Aziraphale which was everywhere. Some things just can’t be duplicated 

Other things could. 

Crowley eyed the walls around him, silently estimating their distance. Noting the threadbare rug over the creaky floorboards. Which ones exactly squeaked again? Crowley, if anything, at least liked to consider himself thorough. He figured if he was doing this, he might as well do it with style. After all, what’s a little more bending of time and space? 

The details took longer to perfect. The exact dimensions were particularly difficult. Crowley had never been good at estimating distances. It was probably one of the reasons that Aziraphale was so distressed anytime he was in the Bently. Back and forth the walls went, the size of the bedroom slightly adjusting every other night. Too big, too small, nope- too big again.

He couldn’t take it any longer- some things just took precision. One evening, he carefully smuggled a measuring tape with him when going back to the bookshop one night. He was hardly convincing, flopping onto Aziraphale's couch after one drink declaring that he'd had ' _ too much- no, must be staying, not safe for all those humans for him to drive back tonight!’  _

Aziraphale had given him a once over with lips pursed, that roughly translated into “I see through your bullshit” but mercifully said no more.

It was a slow process. Over the years, no matter how much he tweaked it, something was always missing. 

There was a severe lack of Aziraphale in the fake room. 

A particular turning point had been to say goodbye to his silk sheets, switching to the soft cotton that Aziraphale prefered.

At first he'd tried just miracling random books in the same haphazard way that Aziraphale left them about the room. That barely even lasted one night.

He awoke the next morning surrounded by books that were strangers. They were nowhere near filled with the care and- dare he say  _ love-  _ that Azirapahle’s had absorbed throughout the centuries. 

Plus he kept tripping over them. 

Instead Crowley opted to just retrieve his own secret stash of ‘borrowed’ books. It seemed to scratch that itch. There was a warmth in his chest when he looked at them sitting there, stacked on the desk. _ Which was dumb _ , Crowley would think with no amount of malice, as he rubbed his chest. 

Every once and awhile, he'd inevitably wind up crashing into Aziraphale's real bed over the bookshop. Sometimes drunk, and sometimes not as drunk as he let on to be. Always alone though, much to his disappointment. When he woke up in the mornings, there would always be something new he noticed. Some small detail that he would be able to take back to the Mayfair flat.

Some mornings it worked. He could wake up and fool himself that he was really there. With Aziraphale bustling downstairs in the bookshop already and if he just laid here for long enough, maybe he'd come upstairs to wake him. Maybe even with a cup of coffee. Or a kiss. 

The thought that maybe Aziraphale may actually one day end up in Crowley's bedroom was such a distant dream that he'd never much worried about what the angel would think of all this.

So unfathomable that Crowley could almost not believe it had really happened. 

After dinner, Aziraphale had gently placed a hand on his forearm and suggested drinks back at Crowley’s place. Once there, he had trailed behind him in the entryway while Crowley made off to the bar immediately. 

“What’ll you have?” He had called out. 

Only to have Aziraphale decline with, “I do believe I had enough to drink for tonight.” 

Crowley had glanced back in confusion. Hadn't they come up  _ for  _ drinks? Why was he fidgeting in the doorway like that? What was making him so nervous that- oh. 

_ Oh. _

He really had not expected Aziraphale to kiss  _ him _ . 

They clashed, nervous lips finding each other until... Until now. With Aziraphale watching him with a small humorous smile, sitting on what must be an oddly familiar bed, in an oddly familiar room. That was putting it lightly. 

Aziraphale moved slowly, as if not to startle him, situating himself onto Crowley’s lap and straddling his hips. He practically glowed with angelic love as he took Crowley’s chin in his hand to tilt him up for a single chaste kiss. Then a second. A third. 

“Do not believe for a second that I’ve forgotten about my books. We  _ will  _ be discussing that later.” 

Crowley’s body finally caught up with itself and he curled his arms around the angel. “No idea what you’re talking about.”

“We’ll see about that.” Aziraphale fucking smirked.

Crowley had never felt more joy than when Aziraphale pushed him back onto a soft cotton and  _ suddenly  _ tartan bedspread. 

+++++

This time when he woke up, stretching limbs in the early morning light, they collided with something warm, and real. Crowley let out a little pleased hum and continued to coil himself around Aziraphale. Aziraphale, who had his spectacles on and was sitting up in bed and paging through  _ The Scarlet Pimpernel _ . He gave an answering hum in response to Crowley’s embrace and relinquished one of the hands from the book to begin carding through Crowley's hair. 

“I’ve been thinking, my dear,” His fingers trailed from Crowley’s hair to trace lazy circles on his bare shoulder. “It really is such a waste for us both to have our own  _ separate  _ copies of the  _ same  _ room.” His lips were pinched in his trademark smug bastard look as he flipped a page of the book. “Obviously, we should consolidate.” 

_ Obviously _ . Crowley laughed. 

"This," Crowley nuzzled into his side, leaving kisses, "is what was missing". 

**Author's Note:**

> These immortal dorks aside, if ya'll ever tumble into your date's room and find it a copy of your own bedroom, please run.  
> Aa-zel on tumblr   
> xxx


End file.
